Multi-time measurement of landscape pattern change using spatial metrics: Istanbul urban study

Cities, as a result of the industrial-based economic-political model that emerged with the industrial revolution, have penetrated into the structure of biological evolution itself, together with its historical, social and economic nature, where both agricultural and non-agricultural production, distribution and control functions are gathered and hosting more than half of the world's population, the human that changes it is a dominant socio-ecosystem. The city, which is both a socio-economic and ecological system, is expanding rapidly from the center to the periphery due to the mechanization process in agriculture, the employment areas brought by different fields of expertise, the feature of being a cultural and economic focus/attraction center, and the agglomeration of the population. And therefore, it causes the productive landscapes (agriculture and forest patterns) remaining in the city periphery to rapidly transform into the built environment, causing a number of ecological problems both on a local and global scale. From this point of view, in this thesis study, in İstanbul which the largest city of Turkey with a population of approximately 15,500,000 people the effect of land use/cover change on the landscape pattern in the 36-year period between 1984 and 2020 is expressed mathematically through landscape metrics. Accordingly, while the category of artificial surfaces increased by 200% in the city of Istanbul between 1984 and 2020, agricultural areas decreased by 304 km2, forest areas decreased by 527 km2. Habitat fragmentation and extinction processes caused by human activities caused the landscape pattern to deteriorate in Istanbul between 1984 and 2020. The landscape metrics used revealed that puncture, fragmentation and extinction processes are experienced together in forest areas and agricultural areas. While approximately 70% of the change in forest areas between 1984 and 2020 was experienced in the northern part of the city, the change in agricultural areas was mostly observed in the south-southwest part of the European side, close to the coastal area. Along with the 831.1 km2 areal decrease in Istanbul habitat areas, the fauna species selected from the IUCN red list have lost almost one fifth of their habitat areas.